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Pushing Pushtape to 1.0

December 12, 2013

I've been thinking a lot about Pushtape development, and I figure it is worth taking a minute to write down where I'm at.

Pushtape 1.0 Release

It's important that things don't stay in beta forever. The goal with Pushtape 1.0 is to get a foundation for a stable distribution, and I'm happy to say that after many months being in beta, beta bug reports have tapered off. Thanks to everyone who filed bug reports and provided feedback!

That being said, there are a couple of critical issues I want to tackle before a 1.0 release:

1. Better Streaming Music Player
Music on the web is increasingly moving from a downloadable format to a streaming format. As a result, a robust streaming music player is more important than ever. The current player in Pushtape is functional, but I'm a little concerned about the future of the Soundmanager2 module and feel that overall it is pretty limited. I'm investigating the idea of implementing a Pushtape Player module which would incorporate a combination of a JS MVC framework (possibly AngularJS) and Soundmanager2. My hope is this player could work in a standalone context, even if you don't use Drupal. I really like the way Pitchfork's player works -- audio links from various sources can be played inline while reading, as well as from a global "page player" that contains a playlist of all playable links on the page.

2. YAML/JSON Discography format
Making discographies portable is a really high priority for me. Pushtape sites should be able to export JSON and YAML representations of their catalog. Migrating information out of a Drupal site can be a pain, and I want to overcome this by using a modern exchange format.

The combination of these two improvements into a 1.0 release have a couple of benefits, but I'm excited most by the possibilities they would open up particularly in breaking through the limits of the Drupal theming layer. It opens up the idea of using Drupal for the backend management of things, while using a modern frontend framework like AngularJS for display. Eventually, it might even up doors for alternative backend management as well...but I'll save that for another post.